The post is a holdover from the days when the council-appointed city manager was also the redevelopment director.

And since the manager post was eliminated and the mayor took on city oversight under the strong-mayor form of government, the question of who is the redevelopment chief has been in doubt. In the interim, the council has appointed the mayor as executive director every six months.

At a meeting Dec. 7, the council reappointed Sanders for only six weeks and asked Councilman Tony Young, the president of the council and chairman of the redevelopment board, to appoint a temporary council committee to think about options. He named Todd Gloria as chairman, Marti Emerald as vice chairwoman and Kevin Faulconer, who represents downtown, and newly elected David Alvarez.

Councilwoman Emerald called for hiring a "redevelopment professional" who would replace Sanders.

Actually, there are now three professional chiefs over redevelopment and two spots are vacant.

One is Janice Weinrick, assistant director of the city's redevelopment department. She answers to Sanders and oversees the many redevelopment projects that have no separate board of directors.

Then there's the Centre City Development Corp., whose city-appointed board used to hire its own president but that now goes to the mayor with council confirmation. That post has been vacant since Nancy Graham resigned in 2007 over issues dealing with alleged conflict of interest and financial disclosure statements.

Her duties have been handled on a volunteer basis by Fred Maas, who had been doubling as both CCDC board chairman and interim CCDC president. CCDC oversees downtown San Diego. Frank Alessi, executive vice president and chief financial officer, heads the CCDC staff for now and Maas has resigned as board chairman effective Dec. 31.

There's also the Southeastern Economic Development Corp., modeled after CCDC to oversee revitalization in the neighborhoods southeast of downtown.

That post also has been vacant since 2007, when its longtime president, Carolyn Smith, left over a spending and salary scandal. Sanders recently nominated Jerry Groomes, city manager of Carson in Los Angeles County, to the $170,000 post. He faces council confirmation, presumably next month.

It remains unclear what the implications would be if the mayor were no longer overseeing all of redevelopment and the job went to another elected official, such as a member of the council, or to a professional, as Emerald suggested.

The obvious choice would be Weinrick, but she could face a conflict if the mayor and the council did not agree on some aspect of redevelopment.

If both CCDC and SEDC were abolished and all redevelopment were handled by Weinrick, it becomes problematic how much time the council -- and city departments -- would have to oversee all the details now handled by CCDC and SEDC and their staffs.

And what would happen if the mayor told the Planning Department to do one thing and the independent redevelopment chief, at the beck and call of the council, told the department to do the opposite?

It's worth remembering that CCDC was created in 1975 because downtown revitalization, and specifically the Horton Plaza redevelopment project, had been sputtering along for years because there was no one with the authority and political muscle to focus solely on bringing back major retailing downtown.

When CCDC was created, it was patterned after a similar agency in Baltimore and recommended by San Diegans Inc., the precursor to today's Downtown San Diego Partnership.

Ironically, Weinrick used to work at CCDC and the partnership's new president who takes over in mid-Februrary, Kris Michell, currently works as chief of staff to Sanders.

All this sounds like really inside-baseball and holds little interest for the general public.

But as the tug-of-war gets played out between mayor and council, the outcome could determine whether the focus-like-a-laser-beam approach to revitalizing San Diego's aging neighborhoods still makes sense in a city where every neighborhood needs more of everything and there's not enough for anybody.